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Remembering Raghu Rai
27 April 2026
Raghu Rai, who pioneered Indian photojournalism, died on Sunday in New Delhi from prostate cancer. He was 83.
Rai was the youngest of four children, born in 1942 in the village of Jhang, which has been part of Pakistan since the 1947 partition of India.
He originally studied to become a civil engineer but took up photography in 1965. He learned the craft from his elder brother Sharampal Chowdhry. A year later, he was the chief photographer for The Statesman, an English-language newspaper based in New Delhi.
In 1976, Rai became a picture editor for Sunday, a weekly news magazine based in Kolkata. He moved to India Today, an English-language news magazine, where he served as both a photographer and a photo editor in the early 1980s.
The next year, he joined Magnum Photos. He had been nominated by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
He captured the important events in Indian modern history, including the Bangladesh refugee crisis in 1972 and the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984. Over the years, his photo essays appeared in Time, Life, The New York Times, The Independent, and The New Yorker.
"I was sent to shoot specific stories," he recalled, "but I would document the entire journey and take my camera out on the plane, on the train, sitting in a taxi, or even a bullock cart, photographing the people, landscape and life.”
He served on the jury for World Press Photo from 1990 to 1997. He also published 18 books, including Raghu Rai's India: Reflections in Colour and Reflections in Black and White.
He also published Exposure: A Corporate Crime about the Bhopal chemical disaster and its ongoing effects on the lives of its victims. Three exhibitions that toured Europe, America, India and Southeast Asia after 2004, the 20th anniversary of the disaster, were mounted to support the survivors.
In 1972 he was awarded the Padma Shri for his work on the 1971 India-Pakistan War and the plight of Bangladeshi refugees.
In 2003, he started using a digital camera on assignment for Geo Magazine in Bombay City. He never returned to film.
"I like being among my own people," he said in one interview. "I merge with them. I don't carry camera bags, I don't wear stylish clothes. I have one camera with a zoom lens so I am not alarming people; no one is saying, 'Here comes a photographer!'"
He is survived by his wife Gurmeet Rai, his son Nitin and daughters Lagan, Avani and Purvai.